The group of highschoolers I mentored
For the past summer I’ve been mentoring a group of teenagers at the South End Technology Center for the Learn2Teach Teach2Learn program. The L2T program is a summer program for youth in Boston (highschoolers) to learn about technology (different fabrication methods, microcontrollers, programming, etc.) and then teach STEM workshops to younger kids all over the greater Boston community. So during the course of this program, in addition to learning and teaching, the youth teachers were put into groups. Each group was expected to complete a project that integrates the different technologies that they learned to solve a problem in their community. The best way to describe this to an Oliner would be like a POE project.
I actually didn’t know going into it that I would end up as an mentor. I had the vaguest understanding of the program, and walking into a room of high school strangers was like reliving the nightmare of being the new kid again. At first I was just awkwardly circling around like when you don’t know where to sit for lunch, then Susan (the program director) pointed at a group and told me to join them, so I did. I helped them out that day, and then one day turned to two, and then every week when I came to the SETC they were always around and eventually this relationship naturally formed.
So what they wanted to do was to bring together the community using music since music is such a big part of who you are when you’re growing up. Their solution was to build a light up musical water piano that could deploy in parks.
If you want to hear them explaining their project go here: https://youtu.be/olgX-EqxAGo
The best picture I could find with all the components featured.
How it worked was the water keys were connected to a Makey Makey, a Makey Makey works such that when an input circuit is completed (ie. you hold ground and touch the water inside the key) it sends a keystroke. The keystroke would then play a note on a keyboard piano pulled up on their computer. We modified source code on the Makey Makey so that in addition to sending a key press it would also write one of the output pins to high. That signal would then be sent into the Arduino which would control a RGB adafruit LED strip. The protoboard connected between the Makey Makey and the Arduino served as a pull down resistor for the signal from the Makey Makey to the Arduino, without it the signal would float around resulting in gibberish being received on the Arduino causing the LEDs to blink in seemingly random patterns.
Trinity lasercutting the cover for the microcontrollers.
So one thing that was really important for me was that they were the ones working on their project, so I tried to be as hands off as possible (generally I only stepped in to debug when even I didn’t know what was going wrong). So they were the ones typing all the code, they were the ones who did all the soldering, they were the ones who designed and laser cut the boxes and I was really impressed, because here were teenagers who learned most of what I asked them to do for the first time this summer, and they were patient, asked questions, and did the work even when it was hard.
Gerard debugging the circuit.
Since I had other responsibilities this summer, I was generally more absent than the other mentors in the program, 2 days a week vs 4-5 days. I usually gave them a list of things they needed to accomplish for the days I wasn’t there, and the thing that would make me feel really proud, was when they would give me a debrief when I came back on what they got done, or send me update emails (keep in mind before you get to college, no one sends emails) telling me what’s up with the project. I was really impressed with how autonomous they were able to be and it really solidified my belief that anyone could do anything as long as they had the right support.
Technically the Arduino was actually unnecessary since the Makey Makey itself is a modified Arduino Leonardo, and has its own output pins, but I really wanted them to have a clean Arduino coding environment without having them work within the existing code uploaded to the Makey Makey.
Satta, Jojo, and Trinity went to the park to take pictures of kids playing with the piano.
I think out of the work I’ve done this summer, this was what I enjoyed the most and found the most rewarding. It was absolutely humbling seeing my group grow over the course of two months. And at the end I knew that they truly owned their own project because when they explained it to people during their project expo they talked about what they had done and not what I had done.
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